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A production designer is the head of the art department. He is ultimately responsible for producing the overall look of sets, props and graphics seen in an episode. He is also ultimately responsible for the practical manufacure of most of his designs, either in-house or through the use of prosthetic or CGI specialists. As such, he is one of the key personnel in the pre-production process. Since the art department is comprised of many sub-departments, the production designer also has managerial responsibilities over a large number of the people working on a programme, equivalent to that of the production manager or the post-production supervisor.
Both in the 1996 telemovie and in the BBC Wales version of the prorammme, he has been one of the first people to be involved in the making of an episode of Doctor Who. Only two people have ever been credited with this position in the history of Doctor Who: Richard Hudolin for the Paul McGann film, and Edward Thomas for every Whoniverse episode produced by BBC Wales as of 2010. In many ways, then, the job of the production designer — insofar as Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are concerned — is the job Ed Thomas has made of it.
As compared with designers
Though related, the job of designer on the 1963 version of Doctor Who was much smaller in scope. Designers only worked on one, or at most two, serials at a time. They also may not have had complete control over the design of every element. For instance on An Unearthly Child, Barry Newberry, was lumbered with a TARDIS interior set that had been created Peter Brachacki, a person who quit the programme after a very brief stint. Thus, one of the central design elements of the show was rendered by someone who did not survive in his post long enough to see his episode filmed. Especially in the 1960s, many of the props were not in fact made in-house, but shipped off to specialist manufacturers. This often resulted in uncontrollable deviations from the original designs, which could not be corrected before filming began. There was thus no single person in charge of the overall look of the programme as a whole, as there is with the production designer. In a practical sense, the "designer" of old had the greatest control over sets and those props they could make in-house.
Designers were also not heads of the art department in the formal sense that Thomas is. Their staffs were not under their administrative control, as is the case with the modern production designer. Because they were employees of the BBC, rather than of the Doctor Who production office, a designer typically had no true powers of firing and hiring, as is enjoyed by the production designer of today.